American Thumb-prints

“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”

“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”

“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”

People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.

Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for building and controlling transcontinental railways and interoceanic fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas, cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for oil borings—he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out his plan.

In theory he is democratic and humane—for the future, after his interests in dividends shall have ceased. But his reckless exploiting of human life for the present, now growing more and more common by means of impersonal agents, is distinctly at war with our foundation, democratic ideas which hold one man’s life as good as another’s and which made his existence possible.

An essentially material basis of life turns his natural idealism into practical values and activities. He is an ideal practician, or rather a practical idealist.

His unnatural attitude toward to-day—that is, his futurity—and his inconsiderateness for to-day’s sunshine, put him in a false position, which bears the fruit of self-consciousness. Nature is not self-conscious. The primal man was not self-conscious. Self-consciousness implies pain; it means that a fellow-being is not at one with his surroundings; that extraneous, false, or hostile things are pushing him from his native status. If his pain, whether physical or spiritual, is eased, morbidness disappears.

In this man’s self-conscious habit he jumps at once to the conclusion that if you do not like his town you do not like him. Your taste is a personal affront. There is no logical connection, but he has a certain “defect of heat” which Dean Swift avers lies in men of the Anglo-Saxon type. The cordiality and open-handedness with which he first met you wanes. That he has one of the best of hearts, and one of the strongest of heads, you are sure. He inwardly has the same faith. He knows it as Achilles knew his own strength, and the knowledge gives him sometimes the leonine front which the son of silver-footed Thetis boasted. But your not recognizing the superiority of his physical and spiritual environment over all the world causes an irritation deeper than the epidermis—to the nerve-centres, in fact.

“What do you think!” he laughed, shaking burlily and plunging hands in pockets. “What do you think! The other day in Washington I met an Englishman, and when I told him the United States was the best country in the world, and the State I lived in the best State in the best country, and the town I lived in the best town in the best State, and the block my office was in the best block in the best town, and my office the best office in the best block–”

“And you the best man in the best office,” I interjected, to which he laughed a hearty affirmative.

“What do you think he said? Why, ‘Comfohtaable, awh! comfohtaable!’ I told him it was comfortable,—damned comfortable.”

This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at times we see foreigners assume, declared such mental individualization to be purely American. Vanity, audacity, and self-appreciation exist among all peoples, and even from the banks of the Isis we hear how the late Dr. Jowett averred, “I am the Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the first college in Oxford; Oxford is the first city in England; England is the first country in the world.”

United with the feeling of personal worth and independence in this citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another characteristic—namely, a great tolerance. He could hardly expect tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our national constitution.

But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of quality—that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic values—his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy, allow no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of differentiation, is no natural endowment, but a result of training, mental elimination, comparison, association, and a dwelling in inherent spiritual values.

Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have this quality if he “had time” and seclusion for thought. But his life makes it possible for an explosive and heated talker, a mouther of platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his esteem with a seer of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His estimate of even lighter publicities is tinctured by this defect—the theatrical, for instance, where a verdant girl, lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the money she inherited from a father’s patent syrup or pills, and an actress of genius and experience fall in his mind in the same category because a theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each.

What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and non-sagacious judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in character—mark, peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the word in the Phædrus—would be hard to estimate.

Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He is apt to fall into the thinking lines of writers of nameless editorials, who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip at quiet folk as “parochial celebrities” and “small deer.” And yet he knows that he lives in an age of réclame, and that by the expenditure of a few dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a name may be set before more people than our forefathers numbered on the first Independence Day.

In his midst is a certain publicity of spirit, and in his estimation work undertaken in the sight of men is of a higher order than that done in the privacy of one’s closet. The active life is everything; the contemplative, nothing. Talking is better than writing—it so easily gives opportunity for the aggressive personality. For a young woman looking to support herself he advocated type-writing in a public office in preference to the retirement of nursery governess. When the girl drew back with the dread of publicity which results from the retired life of women, he exclaimed, “It’s all a question of whether you’ve got the courage to take the higher thing.”

If he is a fruit of self-cultivation, he enjoys talking of the viridity of his growth as well as these now purpler days. During early struggles he may have undergone suffering and privation. In that event, if his nature is narrow and hard, he has become narrower and harder, and his presence, like Quilp’s, shrivels and deadens every accretion save his interest. But when he is of the better sort of soil, adversity discovers the true metal, and misfortune gives him a sympathy, depth, and tenderness that charm you to all defects. You would migrate to his neighborhood to live in the light of his genial warmth. You think of the beautiful encomium Menelaus pronounced upon Patroclus—“He knew how to be kind to all men.”

Beyond all, he is open-eyed and open-eared. And above all he is affirmative; never negative. His intuition tells him it is affirmation that builds, and that Bacon says right—“it is the peculiar trait of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.”

“Why do people buy and read such fool stuff as ‘Treasure Island’? I can’t see.”

“They read it for its story of adventure, and for its rare way of telling the story,” I ventured, in answer. “They read it for its style.”

“Style! Gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book than that myself!”

“Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about it.”

“It’s by a man named Stevenson, and he’s written other stories. Are they all as bad?”

Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete—the word success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development—he worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,—to have returns greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope, with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift in 1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported you as to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.”

The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets there,” it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or trust,” he tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A corporation can do things the individual man would not.” The one who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the ancients sought—the happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to exploit human labor, human need, and human sacrifice—that is, as corporations pass these qualities by.

In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.

Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of the great marks by which a man should be judged. “He has done this.” “He has got that.” “He is clever,” he says. He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is true.”

Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to consider impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling more closely to the permanence of the union.

In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she may, or in her phrase “can,” do so and so, and in rehearsing the matter says he “let her,” he accepts her homage and the servile status she voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many centuries have been apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by such an enchantress.

“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?”

Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain naïveté, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much at the mercy of such associates.

On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed toward the East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing warm and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened the way. By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was strained from the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to lassitude.

“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”

“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success! Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It beats electric lights all hollow.”

“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know. I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m going home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when you’re not home so much.”

“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.

With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.

To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory—all this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no pleasure without an end—that end being money.

The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand. But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something. He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.

This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?

The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is impervious to true American influences.

Our old American teachings!—for instance, the estimate of the greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever—that, it was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material things to living. “That citizen who lives without labor, verily how evil a man!”—’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, and such sentiments as this of Euripides dominated our democracy.

But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of an idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of immigrants, the European conception of work’s inherent ignobleness has grown to strong hold.

“Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,” “Ἔργον δ ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the present day among genuine Americans.

Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite “go,” optimism, and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as these types by the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism really lies—but it must be with their greater spiritualization and greater moral elevation for the future.

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN